Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 10, Number 2, April (2001), pp. 202-212
Abstract
In writingGetting Medieval I tried to discern and work with personal and intimate motives of doing queer history, the deep desires for history that many queers (including me) feel. Years ago I began to feel such a desire to be able to extend somehow into the past, and I witnessed such desire in others, as expressed in passionate readers’ responses to that land- mark of gay history, John Boswell’s 1980 Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. That book was infused with and energized by a 1970s post-Stonewall enthusiasm that triumphantly uncovered same-sex sexuality (as it turned out, a very ’70s-style gayness) throughout the ages; but the desires for history that I noted and continue to note are not necessarily dependent on belief in or assumptions about an “essential” homosexuality across time. In Getting Medieval I discussed Michel Foucault’s profound appreciation of Boswell’s book as he configured and reconfigured his social constructionist History of Sexuality project. From a later generation, a resolutely queer student of mine (“queer” meaning here that he is uninterested in self-replication, wary of the politics of visibility, and fascinated by “an attachment to the hidden, unknown, and irretrievable” in history writing) recently claimed:
As is true for many queers, my own relationship to my queer sexuality was first articulated not through a relationship with another body but rather through texts, specifically queer films and queer histories. I consumed such texts urgently. . . . I was looking for a way to be queer, for a way to fashion my own identity. Queer history is my queer past. . . . [D]oing queer history . . . constitutes a way of being queer, indeed a way of surviving as queered. Queer history is my queer present.
Got Medieval?
Dinshaw, Carolyn (New York University)
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 10, Number 2, April (2001), pp. 202-212
Abstract
In writing Getting Medieval
I tried to discern and work with personal and intimate motives of doing queer history, the deep desires for history that many queers (including me) feel. Years ago I began to feel such a desire to be able to extend somehow into the past, and I witnessed such desire in others, as expressed in passionate readers’ responses to that land- mark of gay history, John Boswell’s 1980 Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
. That book was infused with and energized by a 1970s post-Stonewall enthusiasm that triumphantly uncovered same-sex sexuality (as it turned out, a very ’70s-style gayness) throughout the ages; but the desires for history that I noted and continue to note are not necessarily dependent on belief in or assumptions about an “essential” homosexuality across time. In Getting Medieval I discussed Michel Foucault’s profound appreciation of Boswell’s book as he configured and reconfigured his social constructionist History of Sexuality
project. From a later generation, a resolutely queer student of mine (“queer” meaning here that he is uninterested in self-replication, wary of the politics of visibility, and fascinated by “an attachment to the hidden, unknown, and irretrievable” in history writing) recently claimed:
As is true for many queers, my own relationship to my queer sexuality was first articulated not through a relationship with another body but rather through texts, specifically queer films and queer histories. I consumed such texts urgently. . . . I was looking for a way to be queer, for a way to fashion my own identity. Queer history is my queer past. . . . [D]oing queer history . . . constitutes a way of being queer, indeed a way of surviving as queered. Queer history is my queer present.
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